Archive of Our Own

It starts on the night of the 18th of May, this strange feeling of dying.

The best way it can be described is the very conscious, very deliberate separation of soul from body. Gruesome as it may be, the closest sensation in life that Anne can think of is the separation of a nail from its nail bed. Uncomfortable, though not wholly unnatural; not always painful, unless pressed — then, agony. Still, some grotesque fascination compels her to pry, to prod, to look eagerly to every shred of pain as a testimony to life. After all, that’s what Anne wants to cling to most, as she dies.

Every night she says a prayer before bed: one of the classics, Now I lay me down to sleep. She turns out the lights and goes down on her knees by the foot of her bed. There’s no one to see her but the moon, who will say nothing, and the darkness, a companion she knows only too well. Every year on the 18th of May she fumbles the line If I should die before I wake, and every year she must force herself to say: I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Then she goes to bed. 364 days of the year, Anne sleeps with her neck somehow covered. On this one night, in memoriam the Anne Boleyn of a lifetime ago, she bares it.

She wakes up on the 19th of May at dawn, when the sky is rent apart with newness of colour and a day as yet without mistakes. Anne never eats on that morning, because she didn’t eat on that morning, 485 years ago now.

‘If I could,’ she says, sitting very straight, very still, at the head of the kitchen table, ‘I’d take a car and drive to Brighton, so I could go down to the sea.’

It’s an old flight of fancy of hers from her endless days in the Tower, longing for even a fingertip’s brush of that wild expanse. The sea belongs to no one; the sea, unlike her, was free.

The others say nothing. No one points out that even if Anne had a car, she has no licence, and would probably end up driving herself off a cliff if she tried. Perhaps they think it’s a Freudian slip; go down would certainly imply that. Very well.

‘Or if I were a bird, I’d fly to the top of the Tower and look out across the city and the Green.’

Another age-old fantasy of Anne’s. How many nights had she spent wishing for wings?

‘Or if I were a ghost —’

‘Let’s go to Brighton,’ says Catalina.

Anne looks at her. ‘What?’

‘Let’s go to Brighton. We can go by train.’

The rest of the girls are divided on this. Kitty, who is genuinely affected by the memory of execution, says she’d rather spend the day alone. Anna believes six would be a crowd; Cathy offers to go if necessary, but is obviously worried about leaving Kitty behind. So in the end it’s Catalina, Anne, and Jane who board the train together, bound for Brighton.

‘Just like old times,’ says Anne, which earns a laugh from Jane. But Catalina takes her hand when they step onto the platform, and makes sure they stay far away from the rails as the train clatters into the station.

The sun is high in the sky by the time they pull into Brighton. They snag sandwiches from a nearby cafe for lunch and hop onto the bus that will take them to the cliffs. Catalina and Anne sit together, Jane behind them, and they spend the hour drinking in the glory of the sea: it rolls along beside them, unfurling like a great blue carpet in all its majesty. Occasionally it hides, as the landscape dips and changes, and Anne exclaims in disappointment; then it rears again, more beautifully than before, and she must blink the tears from her eyes to stop her sisters from seeing.

They step off the bus at their destination, still a distance from the cliffs of the Seven Sisters, but near enough to admire the beauty of the coast. At the edge of a plateau, Jane invites them to sit.

‘Let’s have lunch,’ she says.

‘No objections from me.’ And Catalina produces their sandwiches.

The long grass tickles Anne’s arms as she sits, folding her legs under her, her gaze pointed unerringly out to sea. What a different kind of green to be surrounded with, she thinks, how divine! She remembers how it felt to stand in the middle of the Green, raised high above on the wooden scaffold that shook with every step — shook more than Anne herself. She remembers the sea of faces, each blending in with the others, yet everything standing out in a shock of colour and life — yes, a different kind of sea.

A seagull calls above her and she glances up, laughing, at the rest of the flock. ‘Look,’ she cries, pointing, ‘“the birds of the air”!’

‘“They do not sow, or reap, or store away in barns,”’ continues Catalina, remembering.

Jane smiles. ‘“And yet your Heavenly Father feeds them,”’ she says quietly. ‘“Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”’

‘I don’t worry, Jane. At least not anymore. Nor do I want to add even a single hour to my life.’

Jane looks at her quizzically, but the breeze is up and Anne is standing, letting it race and ruffle through her hair. ‘I can see everything from here!’ she calls, and runs to the edge, where she can plunge straight down into the sea. ‘It’s beautiful!’

‘Should we go to her?’ Jane murmurs.

‘No,’ says Catalina. ‘Not yet.’

When Anne tires they pick their way down to the pristine beach. Catalina goes first, and Jane last; so sandwiched, Anne reaches the sand in relative safety. Jane immediately embarks on a seashell hunt to bring some home to Kitty and Cathy, who like to make little trinkets out of such things. Catalina puts her arm through Anne’s, and they walk just along the edge of the water.

‘How did it feel?’ she asks, as they tread upon the foam left behind by the waves.

‘What do you mean?’

‘To die that way.’

Anne squints up at the sun. Her hand goes involuntarily up to her neck; it doesn’t hurt today, certainly not compared to whatever has come before. ‘It’s hard,’ she says, ‘to describe pain.’

‘But there was something.’

‘Yes.’

They go on in silence for a while. Behind them, Jane is kneeling on the sand, holding something in her fingers. Then Anne laughs.

‘What is it?’

‘Like an ant bite,’ Anne says, and dissolves into giggles again. ‘I’m sorry, this is silly. It’s just near impossible to tell you how it felt, and it’s funny that people think it can be done so easily.’

She feels Catalina take her hand. ‘Then don’t,’ she begins, but Anne interrupts eagerly, the words spilling out of her. ‘Listen, Lina,’ she says, and lightly presses a nail to Catalina’s skin. ‘Feel that. Feel it.’

Catalina tilts her head, listening.

‘Like that. Pain, along a ridge, along a line. Worse than that, of course, but somehow that’s the most of what I remember — that feeling along a straight line. The executioner, he touched the back of my neck once, right before. Grazed it. He was aiming. I still remember where. Here.’

‘Anne, you don’t have to,’ protests Catalina, but Anne grabs her fingers and presses them to the warm skin just below the nape of her neck.

‘It wasn’t cold,’ she says, ‘the blade. Of course, it was a warm day. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up all over.’

‘Anne —’

‘I couldn’t see anything. I was listening. It was the hardest I’d ever listened in my life.’

Catalina jolts to a stop. Pulling slightly ahead, Anne turns back to face her. The tide washes in gently under her feet.

‘You don’t have to do this.’ Catalina’s voice is painfully tight. ‘It’s over now.’

‘It happened once.’

‘You don’t deserve to have to go through this again.’

‘Catalina,’ says Anne, and reaches out to her. ‘Do you think I deserved it? The first time around?’

She feels the ground beneath her shift as the tide pulls out again, out into that great unknown. The thought flits idly through her mind: where do souls go? If they too can die, then why is she here? Perhaps her soul got lost. Anne thinks of the Little Mermaid, the original story by Andersen. Perhaps Anne too had become a daughter of the air, those seafoam spirits earning their way to eternal life. That’s irreligious, probably. But a pretty thought all the same.

The gulls call again above her, punctuating the silence with their squawking cries, calling out into the emptiness of whatever is out there.

Anne puts a hand on her throat, feels the pulse through her fingers. ‘There was pain,’ she says hollowly. ‘I can’t tell you how much. But only for an instant. And then — nothing.’

Catalina shakes her head. ‘You didn’t deserve that,’ she says.

‘You’re wrong. I did. I do.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘It isn’t? Search yourself, and tell me. What about everything I did to you? The people whose lives I wrecked, just to get my hands on the crown? The lies I told, the schemes I had?’

Catalina is silent.

‘I think it was a fitting end. Don’t you?’

‘No,’ says Catalina. ‘That’s the biggest lie of them all.’

‘One day,’ Anne says, ‘I might be able to believe I’ve been forgiven. But until then, I think I’ll always be making amends. Doing penance. Reforming.’

‘You’d know all about that.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But Lina, it’s true, I’ve been doing that all my life. Reforming. Somehow, though, I always come back to this same old creature. She won’t leave me alone.’

Catalina looks out to sea, her dark eyes like a watchman in the night. ‘I think,’ she tells Anne, her voice even, ‘it’s you who won’t leave her alone. You can’t let her go.’

‘Do you really think so? That’s a comfort to me.’

‘I do,’ says Catalina. And she takes Anne’s hands.

They stand that way until Jane wanders up to them, cheeks flushed, her hands full of treasures from the waves. ‘When I think of spring,’ she says, ‘and see beauty like this, it seems to me that there must be something worth living for a second time.’

‘And yet it is something,’ Anne bursts out rapturously, ‘to die in the spring!’

‘The sense that the world goes on regardless. And the promise of new life.’

‘That sounds wonderful, except — no matter how ungrateful it sounds — I’m so tired, I’d rather rest.’

‘You’ve earned that,’ Catalina says. ‘That’s what Anne Boleyn deserves.’

Jane touches Anne’s arm gently, smearing streaks of wet sand across her skin. ‘One day we’ll go to the grave,’ she says. ‘But until then —’

‘You can rest,’ Catalina finishes. ‘She can rest.’

Anne gets down on her knees and, with the very tip of her finger, touches the water. It sends ripples flowing across the waves, out into the deep, out into the air, where the seafoam spirits whisper and play. Finally, after all these centuries, Anne’s dream is complete.

‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ she whispers, and touches her neck with the seawater, at the place where the blade first rent her apart. Then she looks up at the others, standing above her with such love in their eyes, and she smiles. ‘Let’s go home.’